Cinder Lake history page

Cinder Lake

Cinder Lake lies just south of Sunset Crater, northeast of Flagstaff
Arizona. Access to it can be had from several directions, but the
best seems to be forest road 776 which is marked as the "Cinder Hills
ORV area" on a sign along highway 89 just south of the turnoff into
the Sunset Crater National Park.

In the 1960s, the Astrogeology branch of the United States
Geological Survey (USGS) in Flagstaff created an artificial
crater field at Cinder Lake in order to train astronauts as
well as test equipment and techniques for lunar exploration.
They used a Lunar Orbiter image to re-create an actual lunar
landscape by setting off charges of the right size to make
craters of the right size, as well as setting them off in the
proper sequence to get the overlaying ejecta layed out in the
same order as seen in the lunar image.

Our trip to Cinder Lake.

On Thursday May 29, 2003, we made an excursion of our own out onto
the Cinder Lake crater field.
We drove up to the Flagstaff area on Wednesday May 28 and camped the first
night at Cinder Hills right next to Sunset Crater northeast of Flagstaff.
My first goal of the trip was to find the USGS simulated Moonscape. Back in
the early 1960s, they used explosives to blast a bunch of different sized
craters to train astronauts and test equipment and techniques out on Cinder
Lake just south of Sunset Crater. I had always wondered where the simulated
moonscape was, so I did some research and found out approximately where it
was. We arrived too late on Wednesday night to do anything but set up camp,
so Thursday morning, we backtracked to the edge of Cinder Lake. Cinder Lake
is a pretty good sized, relatively flat and barren lake of cinder that is
used by ATVers and 4x4s today. From the north edge of the lake, I could just
make out what looked like the craters, so we drove out onto the lake, heading
for an orange-tan colored area about a kilometer or so away. It turned out that
the colored area was the ejecta blanket of one of the larger craters and it
was on the western edge of the crater field. As I climbed out of our
"rover", I paused and in honor of Jack
Schmitt, exclaimed: "There is orange soil here!" All of the craters have
been overrun by the ATVers - they are apparently a favorite for them since
they are the only rough terrain on the cinder lake. But it was cool to walk
in the footsteps of some of my childhood heroes and I really wanted to bunny
hop across the cratered surface as I remember them doing on the Moon so long
ago. Doing some geology similar to what the astronauts did on the moon, we
figured out that the cinder must only be about 3-4 feet deep as the shallower
craters up to about 3 feet deep did not show the orange-tan ejecta while the
deeper craters more than about 4 feet deep did and the orange-tan ejecta is
just the underlying soil of the region. We also noticed that cinder
fragments inside the craters had numerous bits that had a shiny coating while
fragments outside and far from the craters did not - clear evidence of some
shock from the crater formation due to fragmentation damage
and a reminder of what was really found on the Moon too!

Some of the pictures I took during our Cinder Lake visit:

These images are a bit large, so be patient waiting for the download....

This main crater field is in the largest part of the Cinder Lake and is over-run
by off road vehicles. A 2nd crater field is southeast of this in a more isolated
area roughly east of the garbage dump and is surrounded by a fence marked for no
vehicular traffic inside. It is better preserved. We were able to visit this area
on a 2nd excursion and here is a webpage with some images of the area:
Southeast crater field

For more info on Apollo, check out my
Apollo webpage and its links as well.